Quick thought experiment: you're the president of one of the most prudish nations on earth. You're generally accepted, even by your enemies, to be a masterful speechmaker. You're giving a speech at which you're fully aware the media is present, and you know that any remark you make might be blasted around the nation and the planet in a matter of seconds. So here's the question – think carefully now:

Do you deliberately crack a dirty joke about your wife, the First Lady of the United States, having oral sex with Ellen DeGeneres, who is hosting the event?

It's not a terribly difficult question, is it? You don't.

And sure enough, while addressing supporters of the LGBT Leadership Council in Beverley Hills on Wednesday night, Barack Obama didn't. So, how come a story that was, until the middle of this morning, headlined "Obama's double entendre" is currently the "most read" on Politico, while Buzzfeed wants to know "Did President Obama Just Make A Blowjob Joke?" Here, via the Buzzfeed link, is the section of the transcript that's causing all the snickering:

I want to thank my wonderful friend [Ellen DeGeneres] who accepts a little bit of teasing about Michelle beating her in pushups – (laughter) – but I think she claims Michelle didn't go all the way down. (Laughter.) That's what I heard. I just want to set the record straight – Michelle outdoes me in pushups as well. (Laughter.) So she shouldn't feel bad. She's an extraordinary talent and she's just a dear, dear friend – Ellen DeGeneres. Give Ellen a big round of applause.

Now, I wasn't present, so I should issue the caveat that I will gladly stand corrected should video footage come to light in which the president looks up at his audience and gives them a Sid James-like wink. According to the pool report, he let the line "hang, naughtily".

But it seems incredibly obvious what really happens here (especially if you also read the LA Times report): Obama makes an innocuous remark; the audience sees the potential for it to be interpreted in an off-colour way; they laugh; Obama realises the problem, and then heavy-handedly goes on about push-ups for a couple more sentences in an effort to reinforce the point that that's what he meant. (He knows, of course, that he can't explicitly refer to the misinterpretation – that would make things worse.)

I trust it's obvious that none of this would matter even infinitesimally if it didn't play into the popular rightwing meme about Obama being a classless, loutish, "unpresidential" elitist, who spends his evenings making dirty jokes with the gays in Hollywood, while ordinary, hardworking, primarily heterosexual Americans are … [you can complete the rest of this sentence yourself]. Check out the comments on the pieces linked above, or on Twitter: "Unpresidential!", "Stay classy, Obama!", "No class … this is not the time or the place." And on and on.

Eventually, the CBS news correspondent Mark Knoller clarified, on Twitter, that "Pres Obama refused to acknowledge the double entendre he appeared to speak unintentionally." So it was an unintentional double entendre, then. Or, in common parlance, not a double entendre.

At this point in writing this blog post, though, a horrifying thought occurred to me. What if I'm just incredibly naive and clean-minded? What if the president has been sneakily inserting sexy euphemisms into his public pronouncements for months, even years?

I searched for his last weekly address. There, sure enough, he urged Congress to pass a bill to "put thousands of construction workers back on the job" – "on the job"! A transcript of remarks he made in Chicago a few days back, meanwhile, reveals that he talked about "shenanigans" on Wall Street, which is, of course, a blatant reference to vigorous sexual intercourse. Frequently, in speech after speech since he first achieved prominence, he has used the incredibly saucy word "hard". Heaven help us if, as the election race heats up, he tells his supporters that it's time to "get down to business" – because that will constitute nothing more nor less than a direct instruction to them to engage in a no-holds-barred, socialist orgy of unrestrained and shameless fornication.

Wake up, America. You are being governed by a filthy-minded sex obsessive! (Or having your political news reported on by a bunch of them. One of the two.)